The Valley of Death

Yesterday was the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Whether that horror was necessary will be debated till the end of time. It matters not that the bomb killed 70,000 instantly and like number over the years since or that their destruction may have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans and Japanese from death. It opened an era that will never end, one in which death hangs over us all.

Stories on both sides of the issue bombard us, but the one that most disturbed me was the old saw from surviving crew members of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the weapon, that their action was essential to the ending of the war. It is appropriate for these men to have such an opinion and for the media to transmit it. What always gets warped in the telling is that these men have no better vantage than the rest of us for their opinion. That they dropped the bomb does give them insight into the terror of the weapon, but they cannot know better than a person born twenty years later that the good of the event outweighed the evil.

Only a very limited number of people in 1945 were privy to the situation and intelligence on which the action was based. President Truman and his closest military and civilian advisors made the decision, and they must bear the eternal historical heat. What the crew of the Enola Gay came to believe is relevant to them as human beings but says nothing about their ability to judge the decision.

As a veteran of the Korean War, (very much a non-combatant one) I happen to believe that President Truman made the right decision in pushing the U.N. to defend South Korea from invasion from the North. But my views are personal and made with only an amateur’s understanding of the history and world situation. Again, only Truman and his closest advisors’ views are those that count, and they will be judged by history – and by people like you and me.

So it is with most major decisions of life and death situations. Vietnam’s kaleidoscope of decisions must be born by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Johnson made the most important decisions and he suffers for them in history – at least so far. What those who fought there think runs the gamut, and their opinions are personally vital but strategically and politically of little value.

Now the country is embroiled in another controversial war. The number of decision makers among whom we can apportion credit and blame is among the smallest of any conflict in our history. And they have taken to hiding behind the troops who are fighting, bleeding and dieing as justification for their decisions. Every day the media calls our attention to the opinions of individual soldiers or families of those who died in Iraq. Often they proclaim that we cannot do an about face in Iraq as it would mean that their dead comrades or the fallen loved ones will have died in vain.

What the media fails to point out is that these people are being used for the basest of reasons. Instead of standing up and saying it is their sworn duty to have made the decision to make war in Iraq based on the constitutional mandate to defend the nation from weapons of mass destruction and from an evil leader who was plotting our destruction, the president and his closest advisors hide behind those doing the heaving lifting and proclaim that the almost 2,000 lives and tens of thousands of wounded and broken are there to spread democracy to a nation that posed no threat to us in any real sense of that word.

Now we are told that if we do not stay the course, we will betray the dead soldiers. That’s just not true. Those sent to Iraq died for reasons that never panned out and it is likely that those who sent them knew that to be the case before they landed.

That poor disheartened soldiers believe (or believed) in their mission in Iraq is as irrelevant as the views of the crew of the Enola Gay with regard to dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

If we give weight to the false view that only those who fight can judge, we the people are condemning additional Americans and Iraqis to death. We should not be hiding behind those who have fought and died; we should be examining the facts and circumstances as best we can and holding our elected leaders responsible for their actions. It is President Bush who made the decision. It is the Congress that endorsed it.

What those poor men and women on the ground think is immaterial.

Some one had blunder’d.

Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do or die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Blog on!

Wild Bill